I used my time in Lockdown to try my hand at product photography. And I’m glad I did! It’s far more challenging that I had ever anticipated, and offers the time and space for creativity that I don’t often have photographing people.

This particular shot was for Noble & Savage. Tea merchants from Christchurch in New Zealand (best tea I’ve ever tasted…). They have a nautical theme, so I decided to pair their product with a 50 year old model of the Cutty Sark that my father built.

This shot employs a whole swathe of techniques - so let’s start from the top:

Planning:

I had a vague Idea of what I wanted but was having trouble visualizing it, especially the perspectives with the tea on the dock and the boat out to sea. To make it easier I mocked up a scene in Blender (3d modeling software). This was extremely useful when it came to putting together the individual shots. I was able to use this to determine my camera’s focal length, as well as some basic product placement.
I wound up choosing the Lumix S1R for its high resolution, and the Lumix S pro 16-35mm lens (at 16mm):

The Dock:

I started with the dock. That was the easy part. I had a copy of the blender image on my Lumix S1R, and used the Sheer Overlay feature to help line up the dock to the position I wanted. Sheer Overlay places a semi-transparent photo over the viewfinder. It’s typically used for stop-moption, but it works wonders for this kind of composite photography.

The only thing I had to wait for was an overcast sky. Once there I noted the position of the sun so that I could replicate it in my studio (garage…).

The Ship:

The model is the Cutty Sark, once the fastest sail boat on earth, it was used to transport tea from China to England.

The model itself it quite small. This means it’s impossible to capture completely in focus, even at f/22. I used the Focus Bracketing feature in my Lumix S1R to capture 67 photos, each focused slightly further than the last (focus bracketing quickly automates this otherwise painstaking process). These were combined in a program called Helicon Focus. That particular program is a joy to use. Just watching it stack the images together is thrilling.

The ship was lit with a large umbrella top left, and a silver reflector to the right.

I knew that the spot where the hull met the water would be tricky. So I went for a foggy scene. I used vape pen to blow vapour against some black card that I had placed at ‘sea-level’. This was composited into the final scene using a ‘hard-light’ blending mode in Adobe Photoshop. This vapour also makes up the waves that you can see along the top line of the dock.

The Tea:

I made sure to use a similar lighting setup for the tea as I did with the boat.
To catch the reflections in the text I held some white paper near the lens. I also took extra shots with a hand-held Godox AD200 to better light the liquid in both the glass and the plunger.

Holding white paper in front of the camera to highlight the Noble & Savage logo on the tea

Adding extra light to the tea with a Godox AD200

Compositing:

The final result involved quite some time in Photoshop. I worked from back to front. Starting with the boat which I carefully cut out from the background (that was tough with all the rigging). I then blended in the vapour shots to make the waves. Finally I added the dock, then the tea.

The finished image was graded using some old VSCO presets as a starting point, with a few extra tweaks in Camera Raw just to get the shadows and colours how I liked them.

And that’s it. The entire process took longer than I’d care to admit!

I’d like to thank Lumix New Zealand for whom I’m an ambassador.
Godox lights, just because I love them.
And of course Noble & Savage… the finest Tea Merchants I know.

If you’re a product manufacturer and you like my work, feel free to head over to the contact page.